By those charts and notes he’s either got “dumping syndrome” (no lie, that’s what it’s called), which someone in the family would surely have noticed by now, or should be running such a temperature that he’s slightly incandescent and singes everything and everyone that he touches…

@ Daniel:
no Bulimia is something else, “Dumping syndrome” is “dumping” of the food from the gaster, right into the duodenum.
@tharey: also, like you mentioned with his temperature: there is a slight chance, that he has a hyperthyreose… but that wouldn’t explain his high amount of sleepiness (that would be more a hypothreose)… or he just can’t “consume” the food, which he is eating… like a lipase-failure, or even a amylase-failure…

To keep your metabolism up, you should spread your intake of should spread your intake of food from three meals to small amounts every two hours (generic time, experiment for best results/your personal schedule).

You know what I don’t get? Isn’t metabolism how fast your body burns calories? Well, since heavier people need to burn more calories in order to do the same things “average” people do, wouldn’t it make more sense to say a heavier person has a higher metabolism?

Metabolic Rate can be loosely defined as production of energy per unit of tissue mass. This can vary very widely. For example, low-water plant tissues and certain fish can survive being frozen – in which state their metabolic rate is vanishingly small – while creatures such as shrews and hummingbirds in flight maintain a metabolic rate so high that they can starve to death in hours.

In organisms which regulate their own body temperatures internally, faster metabolisms are associated with smaller sizes – since the square-cube law means that smaller organisms have far more surface area per unit volume of tissue to lose heat through. A sufficiently large organism will have trouble dissipating it’s own metabolic heat even if it has a slow metabolism.

Within a particular species more massive individuals generally do burn more calories than lighter ones doing the same things – but they also generally consume more in the first place and rarely actually do quite as much.

I have a feeling that the issue comes up so very often that making a chart is totally natural. I mean, this would require the same level of near omnescient foresight that predicting the tides or the rise of the sun takes.

Depends on the precise item in question. The calorific content of a particular pizza, bag of chips, etc can vary widely. If we had a suggestion of a certain brand, serving size, and – where appropriate – topping variety, it would be a little easier to estimate.

Taking a normal size (UK, 25g) bag of Walkers/Lays/Fritos salted potato chips as found in supermarket-bought multipacks for an example, that’s 134 calories; however the slightly larger size (34g) as found in vending machines etc is 185 calories.

And presumably it also varies with flavouring, whether or not they’re ridge-cut, etc.

Pizza got a bit more difficult as the manufacturers I could think of just had very plain homepages with no info. Searched on a local supermarket instead, so apologies if these are a bit regional.

Dr Oetker 335g Mozzerella; image suggests it’s a 6-slice affair in the region of about 10″ diameter. 441 calories = 130 of them to reach our goal. Or at the supermarket’s current special deal price, £292.50, approx $440. A lot of money. Especially from my perspective given that my take-home pay is equivalent to only £266/week…

On the other hand, the Salami & Pepperoni meat feast pizza from the same range, at a slightly smaller 320g overall, offers a full 873 calories, almost twice as much. Yee-ikes. But that’s still 66 of them and an almost £150 layout. After mortgage, energy, water and other such unavoidable bills, I don’t have that much left on average…

Dude seriously needs to cut down, maybe see a doctor. I could *maybe* pile through three of those in a day before feeling unwell, hitting my daily recommended calories for a largely sedentary worker with the addition of a couple cups of coffee (and still spending a good £48; my normal all-things-considered-not-just-pizza food budget is more around £30-35), and I’m a full size human not a medium-small dog.

If nothing else, they probably want to restrict him to eating nothing but store-brand chips, which come in at 68p for 12×18g. He’d probably double them up, or at least eat 3-for-2 vs the Fritowalkerlays, but that’s still quite a saving… “just” £36~48…
And if all he’s doing is satisfying a calorific black hole, that’s even better, as they’re quite fatty; 100 calories per bag. 570 of them is “all” he’d need; 48 multipacks, £32.64…

So it’s not QUITE as bad as might have been first thought. But though he’s maybe not quadrupling the food bill, he could quite well be doubling it, or tripling it if Jerry’s an otherwise shrewd shopper.

Here, a medium pepperoni pizza from a majorttakeout brand is about 2500 calories per pie. A bag of cheese poofs or potato chips is 1000-1500 calories. 57,000/7 is about 8143 calories. So 2-3 pizzas and a few bags of chips could easily hit that.

I’m starting to think UK pizzas are measured in centimeters, somewhere in the single digits!

“Great Scott! They actually did it! Marty come here, these guys have got it all figured out!”

Seriously awesome job. Lets check the time limit. 3 Hours for first response. Nice. It’s either due to timezone difference or all the calculating all dem maths, but it’s still a nice response time. And the amounts are staggering xD

Also, one (kilo)calorie is equal, in water heating terms, to about 1.16 watt-hours. So that much food energy is equal to an electric power input (to an immersion element) of 66.12 kWh. Similar to running a 3 kWh element (say in a large hot water tank) for 22 hours solid.

For a small room or a decently insulated hot water tank, Tiger could act as a quite effective, if hideously inefficient (in terms of fuel economy / energy price) maintenance heater. If your water tank is a little smaller than normal and very well insulated, and you’re patient, he could even work as the primary heater. He’d also be good as the main heater for a small bedroom with cavity wall insulation and thermal glass, or to charge up a storage booster-heater for weekday evenings in winter.

He’d also be quite hot to the touch, though probably not quite enough to burn you. Dogs are quite well insulated after all. 150′C internally, maybe 60-70′c externally. Which is just nice for a hot water system (including hot water radiator central heating), and about the same as the peak output from a thermostatically controlled hot-air heater.

Now, the challenge is to find some way of feeding him at the same rate for less than $10 a week. Once you manage that, you can start to treat him as an alternative energy source and save on your electricity bills.
(You’re unlikely to make him cheaper than piped natural gas, though, unless you feed him nothing but roadkill and scraps)

That’s what is great about Housepets – I am not a particular fan of arcs involving Pete and King – But I know the next week or so I will be delighted with other characters and situations, with some uncompromissed comedy or other fun situations.

BTW, for comparison, a 3kW kettle will boil up a litre of tap water (15′c) in about 2 minutes. 22 hours = 660 litres boiled the same way… Properly applied, Tiger could you a LOT of cups of coffee / tea / etc. Maybe have him swallow some kind of heat-stable sterile bag with a catheter attached. Fill bag with cold water, wait for 150′c internal temperature to raise it by 85′c (and to fall slightly itself, I guess?), extract it. With the right piping he could even act as a source of low pressure steam for all manner of uses.

But I’m getting away from what I was actually after there. I wanted to figure out how many baths you could take using his energy. Part of which requires me working out the capacity of my own bathtub and hot water tank. I know the tank, once fully heated and with the immersion turned back off, will just about fill the bath at a nice temperature. Say 45′c or so.

Research suggests the absolute capacity of a standard tub is 42 US Gallons, but you’d probably only fill it to about 30, maybe less, as the human sitting in it will displace an awful lot of water. I think a regular hot water tank is about 110 litres?

30 US Gal x 3.78 = 113L … hmm.
However this “full” fill does include the water off the tap gradually cooling as the tank refills from the cold supply without being reheated.

“The human body has a typical volume of 70 litres” … ok.

42 x 3.78 = 158.8
158.8 – 70 = 88.8
So… IDK, LOL. The internet is not being much help here. The smallest standard size seems to be 84 litres, the commonest type about 100. And I’ve completely lost the plot about what I’m doing. If we assume 100, then maybe by the time 90 have been emptied out of it (leaving some gradual loss down the overflow as said human immerses more and more fully) the tap will be effectively running cold, no more than 20′c or so.

If you had one bath a day, that’d be 94 litres each fully boiled. So there’d probably be more than enough to have two full baths (maybe Jerry has one, the pets share the water for the second) at a non-scalding temperature, with enough left over to wash up the dishes. Maybe do a load or two of laundry too if they have a hot-fill washing machine. Certainly, it’s more hot water than I could personally dream of getting through (or affording to use) in a typical week.

I guess the point I’m driving at is Tiger is generating a buttload of heat

(and in comparison to my 8.5kW electric shower… 7.76 hours continuous. You’d shrivel away to nothing. heck, his average power would easily cover my entire electrical baseload with some left over…)

So, even mild curses that would appear unfilted in Peanuts and the like get filtered. Oookay. Let me repost the offending thing without that word in then.

“Let’s try and work out how hot he gets! Or at least how much heat energy he’d be burning through…

A rough calculation from googled information suggests an average sized (~50lb?) dog with a more sedentary than normal lifestyle would need about 1000 calories a day; 7000 a week. So Tiger is somehow burning a little over 8x the expected amount.

Assuming he’s spending most of his time inside in a roughly ~21′c environment, and dogs have roughly the same body temperature as humans (~37′c), that’s 1000 calories every 24 hours to maintain a heat dissipation (with a small amount of kinetic activity that we shall ignore for the sake of this calculation) sufficient to maintain a core temperature 16′c above that of the environment.

Rate of heat dissipation is, as far as I can tell from my limited understanding of the poorly explained equations flying past my eyes courtesy of Wikipedia, linear vs temperature. EG conductors and insulators are rated as a dimensionless “watts per metre per kelvin” (the kelvin being degrees of temperature differential between the measured ends).

Ergo at 8x the energy dissipation rate, there will be 8x the temperature differential.

16 x 8 = 128′C

128′C + 21′C = 149′C … 150 near as GOSHDURNIT (c wat I did there? (approx 300′F), or the temperature of a low-ish oven. Certainly enough to bake bread in some kind of fashion, or to slow-cook a stew.

Tiger, therefore, is actually a mobile high-temperature biomass digester. Or possibly a dragon in disguise?”

That was almost Wikipedia-worthy! XD Even so, I understood that mostly. Maybe it’s because I am good at math?… Anyway, now I am thinking two things: “Over-analyzing much?” and “How has he not started a fire in that house yet?” XD I am also agreeing with what Draven said below me there. Dat science.

There’s a load of difference between calories, lard and overall mass intake

It’s like those psychos from the academy, exercising their bones out to lose two kilos a day? They’re only loosing the water supplies from the body by sweating (mostly anyways), the moment they sip a cup in, it’s all back.

nah nah nah… that only applies if you do it in order to try and kill the fun. i’m more interrested in how the possibilities opened up by my calculations could A/ lead to wacky (possibly even *zany*) hijinks, B/ have a crazy set of explanations, like he’s not actually a dog, or there’s a portal not far from the pit of his stomach acting like a cosmic gastric band (or, overflow vent), etc.

some of the best fantasies act almost like hard sci-fi except for the one or two mostly-plausible fantastic elements that they introduce.

(in the interest of full disclosure it probably bears mention that I’m not only a fan of Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt, but also Poul Anderson and Jennifer Diane Reisz… You get a tasty stew when mixing those contrasting styles.)

Oh my gosh! Quit copying me and cataloguing what I eat! Just because I do it doesn’t mean you can make it your idea. Unless of course me and Tiger are twins, in which of course I would expect it; but if we are twins ………… what exactly did my parents do!

It was entertaining watching people try to figure out the economics as well as the thermodynamics and or medical reasons for Tiger eating so much without getting fat. For all we know, he converts it into more of Pete’s unreachable mana.